Comedy Gold: Reading Your Teenage Diary for a Live Audience

At Portland’s Mission Theater, thirtysomething Tynan is experiencing what most of us would consider a nightmare come to life: He’s reading from his teenage journal. On stage. In front of a live audience.

“Today was mega hype,” Tynan reads. “Had bomb popsicles, watched NASCAR, and ate muffins. I spent the night at Brandon’s and fantasized about his sister.” Other entries chronicle his infatuation with a classmate named Julie and the “hole in [his] belly” left by the death of rapper Notorious B.I.G.

Every entry closes with a description of what he wore and ate for dinner.

Tynan is one of the many participants in Mortified, a series in which adults read and share embarrassing childhood artifacts: secret diaries, unsent middle-school love letters, song lyrics, art, and even a book report or two. Over the last decade, it’s spawned dozens of live shows, a Sundance Channel TV series, and now the documentary Mortified Nation, which opens this month.

Directed by Mike Mayer, MortifiedNation chronicles the history of the series — which began when creator Dave Nadelberg stumbled across an awkward love letter he’d written as a teenager — and its spinoffs, interspersed with clips from live shows and commentary from participants, organizers, and experts, including developmental psychologists and an author of young-adult fiction. True to its title, Mortified Nation might make you wince a little, but mostly it’s a loving (if occasionally sheepish) celebration of the maelstrom of emotions, careful posturing, and naked vulnerability that make up adolescence.

The core of Mortified Nation is, of course, the readings. There’s the closeted preacher’s son in Texas; the girl terrified that her wealthy classmates will discover that she and her mother clean their houses; the boy writing songs for his imaginary career as a rock god; the girl writing notes to her “future husband” while obsessing over a waitress at Chi Chi’s; and, of course, Tynan, “a lovesick 15-year-old who had the heart of a poet and the vocabulary of Flavor Flav”; alongside many more — invoked with wry affection by the adults they’ve since grown into.

Even if you’ve never written a second-grade book report on The Exorcist, or vented your anger at your parents by listing every swear word you’d heard (and a few made up on the spot), you’ll recognize the frank awkwardness and raw intensity of Mortified Nation all the same. It’s funny, touching, and intensely relatable.